A friend of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, he was an important figure in musical scene in Weimar before the First World War.
Lindner's earlier career was spent in Leipzig, where his recently completed opera Ramiro was first staged in September 1886 at the Neues Stadttheater, with Mahler conducting in his own first season there.
Lindner was a pupil of Edmund Abesser and Gustav Kogel for the piano; of Volck and Friedrich Stack in composition and of Franz Götze in singing and, at the age of twenty, became a chorus master in his home town.
He produced many songs (over sixty, some with orchestral arrangements) for voice and piano in a romantic and dramatic, sometimes declamatory style, using post-Wagnerian harmony, mostly published by the Hermann Seemann Nachfolger Verlag to texts by such poets as Carl Busse, Ada Negri, Otto Roquette and Emil zu Schönaich-Carolath, whose almost exact contemporary he was.
Lindner was sometimes attracted to exotic or eastern subjects, typified by the short song cycle "Lieder des Saidjah".